R-E-S-P-E-C-T

August '14

from Hemmings Muscle Machines

So I'm reading the May 2014 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines and I come to Senior Editor Jim Donnelly's excellent article on Giulio Mancuso's '68 Ford Fairlane Torino GT 428 Cobra Jet ["Stealth (Cobra) Jet", HMM #129]. And I stop. It's a very rare car, but I think I drove one of those back in the day.
So I go to my old notes and photo files from when I worked as a writer for Hi-Performance Cars magazine, and there it was. But it wasn't a '68 Ford Fairlane Torino GT 428 Cobra Jet. It was a '69 Ford Fairlane Cobra 428 Cobra Jet. Huh?
Wait.
It was a Cobra with the Cobra Jet engine? Yeah, that's it. But it wasn't a real Cobra, was it? That was the two-seat sports car. It was a Fairlane Cobra. Jeez, a muscle car named "Fairlane." But it was a Cobra. With the Cobra Jet engine. Right? A Fairlane Cobra.
And see, right there was one of Ford's biggest problems during the muscle car era. Ford had some of the best running gear out there, but they didn't know how to market it. They never could establish a definitive and consistent high-performance image for their muscle cars. Slapping Carroll Shelby's word "Cobra" on anything that moved was one of Ford's last-ditch attempts to establish a credible performance image for its high-performance cars.
By contrast, look at the Pontiac GTO. Even toward the end of the era when the GTO was no longer king of the street, you said "GTO" and everybody knew what the car was, what it was about, and showed respect. It's a shame Ford never got it right, because its muscle cars were extremely strong runners, especially after the '68½ intro of the 428CJ engine.
The car I drove way back when, the Fairlane Cobra, was a great example of how Ford could put the hardware on the street but nobody noticed. The '69 Ford Fairlane Cobra was a new model designed to combat the Plymouth Road Runner and Dodge Super Bee in the econo-muscle car category. Like its competitors, the Cobra had a spartan interior--cloth bench seats, rubber mats on the floor, etc. To get buckets, you had to go to the up-trim level Fairlane Torino GT model, like Mancuso's. Other Cobra standard touches included a blacked-out grille, exposed hood pins, and snake decals.
My test car was a feces brown Sportsroof, Ford's word for fastback. OK, brown was a popular color in 1969, I grant you. But the fastback roofline on a big 200-in. long car with a 116-in. wheelbase never looked right to my eye. It looked, well, awkward. You could order a Fairlane Cobra in a formal notchback body style, but I never saw one.
Put looks aside and you find the great 428CJ standard under the hood, deliberately underrated at 335 hp at 5,200 RPM and a stout 440 lb.ft. of torque at 3,400 RPM, with a 10.6:1 compression ratio. Backing all that grunt in our test car was a C6 three-speed automatic and a cool 3.91 limited slip rear axle. A 4.30 was optional for $6.53 extra.
What a great running muscle car. Punch the throttle and the 428 responded in spades, and you were quickly blasting toward ticket territory. The C6 was one of the better automatics of the era with right-now shifts up or down, even manually when you wanted.
My notes indicate that our day at the test track started out tepidly with runs in the mid-14s--until we got the hang of coming off the line without making the F70-14 Goodyear Polyglas tires melt down. Toward the end of the day, we removed the air cleaner, blew up the rear tires to 35 psi and shifted the C6 manually right at the 5,200 RPM redline. That netted us a 13.94/101.70 run--best of the day.
And our test car also had the Ram Air option, which cost $133.44 extra and made the hood scoop functional, letting the 428 cubic inches breathe cooler outside air and make even more horsepower. The official engine horsepower rating remained the same even with the Ram Air option.
Also impressive was the car's handling. In retrospect, none of the muscle cars of the era could handle worth a damn. But we didn't know that in 1969. So I thought the Fairlane Cobra was a very good handler with its fat (for the time) tires and suspension--front coils and stabilizer bar and conventional Hotchkiss rear axle with leaf springs. But Ford's engineers seemed to get all the spring and shock rates just right so that the car rode firm but smooth and stable on the highway, with responsive feel on the curves. We spent a good hour on the handling loop, storming through corners, manually downshifting the C6 to second, hitting the apex, then punching the 428 hard and letting all the torque pull us out of the turn. Lots of fun.
On the street, it was a different, somewhat sadder, story. No one noticed; no one cared. I remember one night in particular. I was desperate for a run. Tried everywhere. No one would give the brown Fairlane any recognition whatsoever. It was late when I finally pulled into the White Castle on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and spotted a few guys I knew. I walked over to where they were talking.
"Hey guys, anybody running tonight?" I asked.
"Why, whaddya got?" one guy said.
"The Ford over there," I said, pointing to the Fairlane Cobra.
"Uh, nah," he said and turned back to the conversation. "So as I was saying, Vito just put glass packs on his '57 Chevy..."
Like I said, no respect.
I liked the Ford Fairlane Cobra a lot while I was inside it, driving. Unfortunately, at some point, I always had to get out of the car and see it. And to my eye, it wasn't pretty.
P.S. To all you Ford guys who have been writing to me complaining that I don't write enough about FoMoCo muscle, there you go.

This article originally appeared in the August, 2014 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.